Speaking the Language

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It’s back-to-school time at the Lindberg household, as a new
semester of Vietnamese lessons begins this week. Once again I’ll
climb the stairs to my tutor’s Chinatown walk-up, dog-eared vocab
book in hand. Once again I’ll return to my well-worn boulder and
confounding hill, to resume my lifelong, Sisyphean attempt to
learn a foreign language.

Professor Lap is an affable septuagenarian from Vinh Long
province, possessed of periwinkle hair and infinite patience.
Over the 22 months that I’ve studied Vietnamese with him, he has
never lost his temper, no matter how relentlessly I butcher his
mother tongue. His stoicism is a lesson in itself.

After retiring from a career in engineering, Lap took up teaching
Vietnamese out of his apartment. Alas, it seems no amount of
engineering could transform me into a capable Vietnamese speaker.
My vocabulary still ranks below that of a toddler, my
pronunciation no better than a newborn’s. As with every second
language I’ve endeavored to learn, some basic click has gone
unclicked.

The irony of this—Hi, I’m Peter; I make a living traveling
and using words—is not lost on me. I may be a chatty
raconteur at home, but overseas I’ve always been a conspicuously
quiet American.

My wife has no such problems. Born in Tehran, educated at
international schools, Nilou spoke three languages—Farsi, French,
and English—by the fourth grade. That same year her family left
Iran for Paris; when she was 12 they moved to the States. In
junior high she picked up Spanish, the way other people might
pick up a stapler. Fluent in four tongues, she has no trace of an
accent in any, such that shopkeepers in Chicago, Lyons, Seville,
or Shiraz will all assume Nilou is a local. (If I’m with her,
they guess she is a tour guide.)

I’ll try again—the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps
down the palate, to collapse, in shame, on the teeth. This
usually goes on for another 15 minutes before she gives up and
goes back to her Le Figaro.

With teams using more than 100 unique apparatuses to launch globular projectiles a half-mile or more, the 27th annual World Championship Punkin Chunkin event is our pick as November’s Weird Festival of the Month.

Unlike Nilou, I came to languages late—at 14, with eighth-grade
French. The teacher was a patchouli-reeking Deadhead from
Montepelier, Vermont, which she insisted on pronouncing
“Mohn-pell-yay.”

It was the wrong language for me from the get-go. French, I
quickly learned, is far less intuitive and far less forgiving
than other tongues: precision is everything. (I have read that
hapless French schoolchildren are forced to hold their
crayons between the nose and upper lip for hours on end,
to strengthen the muscles required to produce that pinched
eu sound all budding francophones know and loathe.)

Through free-flowing conversation and interaction among students,
the best language instructors make speaking feel as natural as
possible. The problem is that (a) there is nothing remotely
“natural” about speaking French, as any kid with a pencil
mustache would tell you if he could only form the words; and (b)
when you’re a shy, pimply-faced pubescent boy, the very last
thing you want to do is make eu sounds in a dialogue
with Gretchen Hoginski, who already thought you were kind of odd
and mumbly to begin with.

And so it was in eighth-grade French class that I experienced the
first twinges of performance anxiety. That’s how it’s been for me
ever since. In France, I still break into flop sweats at
boulangeries, banks, and railway stations, nervously
awaiting my turn in line. Often I’ll chicken out before reaching
the front of the queue, telling myself, Y’know, I don’t
really need that croissant/cash/train ticket. It’s cool. I’ll
just walk over here instead.

So, as a monoglot traveler, do I have a less “complete”
experience than my polyglot wife? Of course I do. Traveling in
places where you don’t speak the language is like going to a play
in Hungarian: the scenery is lovely, but you have no idea what
the hell is going on. (Wait, why’d that guy kill the other
guy? Is that her boyfriend? Hold up—that’s her dad?) The
monolingual tourist always has the nagging sense that he’s missed
something—that same feeling you’d get from the dating sections of
old Berlitz phrase books, which jumped magically from “Can I buy
you a drink?” to “How was it for you?”

But back to professor Lap. I’ve been traveling to Vietnam since
the mid-nineties, yet until two years ago I’d never attempted to
learn the language. It is, needless to say, challenging for a
Westerner. Like Mandarin and Thai, Vietnamese is a tonal
language, demanding both a highly attuned ear and a high
threshold of embarrassment, since one is not just uttering
strange syllables but singing them. While it does use the Roman
alphabet, written Vietnamese functions more like sheet music,
with diacritics to indicate the tones. Those tones are crucial: a
single phoneme—like ga—might have five different
meanings based on variations in pitch. My constant fear is that
the wrong melody could turn “I’d like to rent a motorbike” into
“I’d like to eat your dog.”

After a few months with Professor Lap, I returned to Vietnam to
try out my newfound skills. My fantasy was to sit in a café next
to a tableful of giggling Vietnamese teenagers, who, as per
usual, would poke fun at me in their native tongue, the big goofy
American, until I’d finally spin around and say, in pitch-perfect
Vietnamese, “AHA! So I amuse you, eh? Well, look who’s
talking now, suckers!”

Sadly, Professor Lap hadn’t taught me how to say “suckers.” And
overall, speaking Vietnamese didn’t work out like I planned. I
was comfortable enough with food words—eating being my favorite
thing to do in Vietnam. It was sentences that flummoxed me. I
could launch conversations, but had to withdraw quickly before
they got too involved. Here was a not-atypical exchange, this one
with my hotel concierge:

“Mm-hmm,” I said, considering my options. He waited. A full
minute went by. My cheeks grew hot. Finally, like a typewriting
monkey, I let loose a flurry of Vietnamese words—any words, just
to fill the space—which I believe translated to: “Cat! Blouse!
Shrimp! Pencil! Soup!”

A look of panic crossed the concierge’s face. He stood perfectly
still, hoping I’d just walk away. I did.

In some cases people wouldn’t even acknowledge I was speaking
Vietnamese. At restaurants I’d ask the waitstaff for my
bill—thanh toán tiê'n—only to be met with blank stares.
“Thanh toán tiê'n,” I’d repeat, scribbling the air as if
signing a check. Again, nothing. I could see their mental gears
turning: How strange—it sounds like the pink man is saying
“Check, please,” but he couldn’t possibly be speaking Vietnamese.
So what is it he wants?

After a week of this I began to doubt my ability to communicate
at all. Why had I chosen such a difficult language? So I’d have
yet another excuse to fail? Why not, say, Italian? It always
sounds so easy, so obvious, so fun. All those hand gestures! But
no. I had to pick Vietnamese—lousy, useless, singsongy
Vietnamese.

Anglophones are blessed and cursed to speak the planet’s lingua
franca; wherever we go, the world indulges our ignorance. That’s
surely why the U.S. has such a low rate of bilingualism. The
other reason is just stubborn, swollen pride, particularly among
males. American men don’t speak foreign languages for the same
reason we don’t consult road maps or dance the tango: because
we’re afraid of looking stupid, particularly in hostile terrain.
It is a humiliating thing to be reduced to a babbling buffoon,
all the while knowing that if they’d just for God’s sake
speak ENGLISH one would be revealed as the charming and
eloquent man folks know back home.

In John Fowles’s novel The Magus, the protagonist—a
British ESL instructor living in Greece—likens teaching English
to foreigners to “being a champion at tennis…condemned to play
with rabbits.” Whenever I travel to non-English-speaking
countries, I feel rather like a rabbit forced to play tennis with
Rafael Nadal—except Nadal doesn’t realize I’m actually
awesome at hockey.

And there’s the rub. In my native tongue I take pride in
deploying words carefully. Speaking French, Farsi, Spanish, or
Vietnamese, I’m all too aware that I sound like a jackass.

Other people, not so much. At a restaurant in Provence, I winced
as a British tourist made a fool of himself in horrible French,
ordering “cocka van” (coq au vin) and “frizzy larduns”
(frisée au lardons). Yet the waiter ate it up—and
understood every word. When he arrived at our table, by contrast,
I could barely get a word out, so hung up I was on proper
conjugation and gender agreement.

Which prompts the question: Is it better to say a few things
well, or many things badly? If you’re too concerned with
linguistic correctness, you wind up losing le bois pour les
arbres. Perfectionism is self-defeating. The trick, I now
realize, is to plow ahead undaunted, using whatever words you’ve
got, no matter how ridiculous you sound.